United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust is currently running a 12 week public consultation into the future of its nuclear medicine service.
Nuclear medicine is a specialist imaging technique involving the administration of radioactive substances (called radiopharmaceuticals) in the diagnosis and treatment of disease.
There are over 20 different tests that nuclear medicine can perform and they look at conditions as diverse as Parkinson’s disease to delayed gastric emptying. In United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust (ULHT) hospitals, the most common tests performed are bone scans and heart scans.
The service is currently provided from three hospitals in Lincolnshire: Lincoln County Hospital, Grantham and District Hospital and Pilgrim Hospital, Boston. The service sees around 2,500 patients per year for very specialist tests.
The service has long faced challenges around staffing, aging equipment and sustainability, and therefore it has been deemed unsustainable in its current format.
The consultation has been launched on identified options to reduce the number of hospital sites that the service could be delivered from in future. These options have been developed by hospital clinicians, and shaped by patient representatives.
The options are:
- Option 1: Centralisation of the service at Lincoln
- Option 2: Centralisation of the service at two sites – Lincoln and Pilgrim
The public consultation runs from Monday 28 February 2022 until Monday 23 May 2022.
Staff, patients and the public of Lincolnshire are invited to give their views as part of this consultation, ahead of a decision being made about the future of the service later this year.
Feedback can be provided in the following ways:
- Fill in our survey
- Come along to one of our virtual consultation events on Microsoft Teams, details below:
- Invite us to one of your meetings to discuss the service, by emailing communications@ulh.nhs.uk